Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Men Without Women – Haruki Murakami (2014)

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

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Most of all in his short fiction, I can never quite tell how seriously to take Haruki Murakami’s writing, but at the same time I am compelled by it. The lack of seriousness I feel (and I don’t mean in the writing itself, because I do think he takes himself seriously, and in an appropriate way) is that so many of the stories are almost exactly alike the other stories. If you took the names off and took the plots away a little, would you […]

Mixed Bag Catch-Up (Books I listened to while painting the house)

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

All you Zombies by Robert A Heinlein

The Great Crash by John Kenneth Galbraith

Scary Stories Collection by Alvin Schwarz

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

Somebody's Darling by Larry McMurty

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Terminal Boredom – 4/5 Stars A small collection of stories from the science fiction writer Izumi Suzuki. It’s important to note that these stories are selected from a decades long career. This seems to be a first foray into a larger translation project of more of Suzuki’s writing, especially her novels. The stories are mostly subtle, intimate explorations of stories that are running through various science fiction tropes and ideas. These are ideas that are usually fully established in the story before we begin, and […]

Mixed Bag Catch Up

Samarkand by Amin Maalouf

Shiloh by Shelby Foote

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl

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Samarkand – 4/5 Stars This book immediately wonder how many novels have Omar Khayyam as a major or main characters. So in this way, being shown in careful detail and with loving care how and why Omar Khayyam is such an important person, cultural touchstone, and inspiration to such a huge part of the world is itself a gift that this novel offers. In addition to this, the sense of adventure in this novel that is created in the opening sections, and then carried over […]

Such a Murakami novel

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

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I seem to always say this, but I don’t really know how to review Haruki Murakami’s books. They’re so inexplicable and enjoyable and uneventful. A Wild Sheep Chase, according to the man himself (in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running), was his “real starting point” as a writer – and that makes sense. Hear the Wind Sing, his first novel, has all the hallmarks of a Murakami novel, but doesn’t quite work as well. He hasn’t really found himself yet, and it […]

On day Turl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n.

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

Guys and Dolls by Damon Runyan

Wind/Pinball 1973 by Haruki Murakami

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

The Blood of Elves by Andrej Sapkowski

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins

Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich

Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney

The Prince by Niccola Machiavelli

Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas

The Three Paradoxes by Paul Hornschmeier

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

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The Cyberiad – 3/5 Stars This is a collection of short stories by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Although it’s a collection, it’s more a series of linked stories almost in the form of a novel. If you’ve read a Stanislaw Lem novel, and I think this is my third, you’ll recognize a cognizant effort to question reality, but also the conventions of science fiction in general. Some of his novels like Solaris are highly metaphysical in nature, while authors, like Pirx the Pilot are […]

I’m on Kauai, in Hawaii, today, Friday, August 5, 2005.

What I talk about when I talk about Running by Haruki Murakami

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A short collection of memoir essays by Haruki Murakami about running. What’s most interesting about this collection is how banal he approaches the subject. To be fair, a lot of Murakami novel dwell in the banal by design, so this is not a surprise really, but it really works here. One of the reasons that works is because he actually is a serious runner, but still an amateur. So this is not a memoir by a professional or competitive runner, but of a writer who […]



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